Iran’s senior navy commander has denied that the country has already fired long-range missiles, but says that they will do so in the coming days.

Mahmoud Mousavi told Iran’s English-language Press TV “the exercise of launching missiles will be carried out in the coming days.”

The ten-day naval exercise will culminate in a grandiose display of the Iranian regime’s ballistic arsenal. Senior navy officers boasted that ground-to-sea, surface-to-surface and surface-to-air missiles, some of which could theoretically be fitted with nuclear warheads, would be tested in the Gulf of Oman at the southern end of the Persian Gulf.

Earlier the semi-official Fars news agency, Press TV and the state-run IRNA news agency had reported that the test-firing had already taken place during the exercise on Saturday.

The exercise escalates tensions in the Persian Gulf, just days after it threatened to hold the world’s economy to ransom by sealing the Strait of Hormuz – a vital energy waterway.